Luftwafffe pilot rotation

[FMAlanbrooke]

Hi, it seems to me that the Luftwaffe had no system for pilot rotation i.e. a system of giving experienced pilots a rest and moving them back to training organisations for a while. Is it true to say that if you were a Luftwaffe fighter pilot you kept flying until you were dead or otherwise incapaciated?

[andy120]

Yip, that is pretty much it and the reason there are huge claims by Luftwaffe pilots and not in RAF/USAAF pilots who ended up flying a desk. Andy

[FMAlanbrooke]

So which system do you think was better? I suppose the Luftwaffe system created a pool of very experienced aces mixed up with a lot of not so well trained pilots while the Allied system created a lot of well trained pilots with little experience? Obviously if I was a pilot I would prefer the Allied system, did the Luftwaffe just not think about using experienced pilots to transfer their skills to new pilots or was it some sort of Nazi ideology thing that German pilots don't need a rest? I've read of some pretty wierd effects of so-called "battle fatigue" on allied pilots.

[Larry deZeng]

If an otherwise unwounded pilot with many months of action at the front started to lose his "edge" or was judged "fatigued" by his unit MD, he got reassigned to a training unit as an instructor or to a desk job until he was ready to return to combat, which seemed to be anything from a couple of months up to a year or so. This is easy to see and verify in the career postings for Luftwaffe pilots. Of course there were some who just kept going, but they were a minority. What the Luftwaffe did not have was a mission limit imposed from above like the USAAF had. I can't speak for the RAF.

L.

[John Beaman]

Just to follow up on Larry's comments about USAAF pilot limits, it was not missions, but hours flown in combat or operations. The orginal was 200, then 300 and eventually 400 hours. Guys who wanted to stay on ops would cheat, a lot, in their log books. When the P-51 became operational, there was, of course, a lot more hours on a single mission. In the book "1000 Destroyed", the author talks about the 4th's, Commander Donald Blakslee, guarding his log book with great care and only starting to count the hours when he crossed the enemy coast!

George Preddy, leading Mustang ace, also kept bumping up his hours until he had well over 500 before rotating home for a 6 week "rest".

The idea of rotating home was not only to give a pilot a rest, and they were not obligated to go back into combat--that was voluntary, but to have them impart their skills and experiences to pilots under training. Some liked that, others found it very booring and chaffed to get back into combat.

[Larry deZeng]

John: Why does "60 missions for a fighter pilot and 30 missions for a bomber pilot" stick in my decaying and mold-riddled brain cells? Where did I get that from? Could that have been an early policy that was done away with, or perhaps a new policy that came along toward the end of the war? Or maybe I am just halucinating? But I swear I read that somewhere years ago.

L.

[NickM]

Originally Posted by Larry deZeng

John: Why does "60 missions for a fighter pilot and 30 missions for a bomber pilot" stick in my decaying and mold-riddled brain cells? Where did I get that from? Could that have been an early policy that was done away with, or perhaps a new policy that came along toward the end of the war? Or maybe I am just halucinating? But I swear I read that somewhere years ago.

L.

I reckon it's because bomber crews had a much "harder row to hoe" they had a shorter (IE: survivable) tour of duty, while the fighters had a longer time to fly-especially as they suffered lower casualties & were often much more aggressive.

[John Beaman]

Originally Posted by Larry deZeng

John: Why does "60 missions for a fighter pilot and 30 missions for a bomber pilot" stick in my decaying and mold-riddled brain cells? Where did I get that from? Could that have been an early policy that was done away with, or perhaps a new policy that came along toward the end of the war? Or maybe I am just halucinating? But I swear I read that somewhere years ago.

L.

Larry, I think you are correct, but I think it was the last year of the war, more or less. I do not have the documentation handy, but after the invasion, and the bomber losses dropped considerably, the 60-30 came into effect. And, towards the end, maybe the last 6 months, the bomber guys had to have 50 missions. I think the 60 mission fighter pilot requirement was in lieu of hours since the escort missions were so long in 44/45.

[Larry deZeng]

Yes! I remember the "50" for bomber pilots toward the tail end of the war, too. That's right.

[Mikael Olrog]

I interviewed a B-24 pilot who said that he had to do 50 missions on his first tour and then joined for a second one but the war ended before completion of that one.